A Most Rebellious Debutante

Book review: a rebellious life in Leonara Carrington’s The Debutante and Other Stories

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But the blue-bloodedness of the aristocracy was, says MacCarthy, a bit of a snobbish myth. And the McAlpines were pretty rich, so acceptance was quite quick; it only took a generation or so if you had money - because money was power. And being a deb was a costly business. A Tatler feature painstakingly estimated every coming-out cost.

The class of may have been a wealthy lot for the most part, but many had led very sheltered, chaperoned lives in comparison with today's 17 and year-olds. Nevertheless, MacCarthy agrees with the late Nigel Dempster's estimate that at least five per cent of the girls were no longer virgins by the time they came to pay their respects to the monarch and her consort. He perked up in her year, recalls MacCarthy, only when he winked at the daring Dominie Riley-Smith who arrived in a tight-fitting sheath dress of mauve instead of the standard full-skirted frocks of wild blue silk.

Riley-Smith - who went on to marry the landowner and future Vice Lord-Lieutenant of Essex, George Courtauld - was later to write a satirical novel about the event, Curtains for Curtseys. I remember a girl being spirited away to Switzerland, although some boys, or escorts, would make only token assaults on our virginity because they wanted us to behave like their sisters.

Heavy petting was tacitly allowed, the onus being on the girls to set the limit.

Rebel belles: Dance performance looks at the world of debutantes

MacCarthy recalls how she learned to steer clear of "an especially obnoxious group of Chelsea smoothies" known as the Rawlings Street Gang. Gatecrashing by plausible young men on the make was rife. In the days when nice gels didn't have brains, let alone careers, MacCarthy was one of only four in her Season to go to university. She went to Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, where she has just been made an Honorary Fellow, and later became an eminent biographer of Lord Byron, the writer-designer and socialist founding father William Morris and the artist-craftsman Eric Gill.

She did falter once and succumb to the system - a year out of Oxford she married a young businessman from a military family, but eventually felt stifled by the life of shoots and hunt balls.

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Two years and one divorce later, MacCarthy went to work on the Guardian newspaper in as assistant to its first Women's Editor, the be-trousered feminist Mary Stott. She was terrified of being found to be a former deb by her class-warrior colleagues, even though, as she points out, those quintessential iconoclasts of the time, Peter Cook and David Frost, both married debs.

I was desperate to be taken seriously, and there was always a knee-jerk reaction to debutantes as terribly silly people, so the less I said, the better. I have always been conscious of trying not to speak like the Queen," says MacCarthy, now 67, who - try as she endearingly might - still pronounces "out" as "ate". She was even chosen as the poster girl for a Guardian advertising promotion for women journalists - photographed biting into an apple above the caption "Should women have teeth?

MacCarthy was not the only rebellious deb of Among her contemporaries, Nicolette Powell went on to marry the pop star Georgie Fame - certainly a rebellion of a sort - while Sally Croker-Poole married the Aga Khan. But the revolutionary spirit of infected two other girls rather more radically.

Having come out as a "docile" debutante, MacCarthy's friend, Teresa Hayter, later came out as an International Marxist - putting that transformation on the record with the punningly titled book Hayter of the Bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, Rose Dugdale, a member of MacCarthy's childhood dancing class, joined the IRA, later serving a long prison sentence for stealing Old Masters in in order to trade them for the release of the Old Bailey bombers and hunger-strikers Dolours and Marian Price. After her short-lived first marriage to a suitable match, MacCarthy never again reverted to type.

I wrote a biography of him," she says, laughing. Instead, the show brings New York audiences into the world of cotillion-style dancing. In fact, each show ends with a dance, and Frank encourages audience members to dress up and join the ball. You agree that you, and not BrooklynPaper. You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening or sexually-oriented material or any material that may violate applicable law; doing so may lead to the removal of your post and to your being permanently banned from posting to the site.

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